Re: The Nanogirl News~

From: Brett Paatsch (paatschb@optusnet.com.au)
Date: Mon May 26 2003 - 00:43:38 MDT

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    Party of Citizens wrote:
    > >
    > > > What is there about so-called carbon nanotubes which links them to
    > > > nanotechnology any more than any other molecule?
    .
    > It is a sincere question. Every molecule could be called nano-whatever. Is
    > there any special reason carbon nanotubes get that label? We don't refer
    > to nano-rna for example.

    There are plenty of others who could answer this better than me,
    but I'll take a crack and let them inform both of us.

    Carbon-nanotubes do not occur naturally there are structures that
    have been manufactured. Indeed they are amongst the first
    manufactured nanostructures with properties that might hold
    promise as elements in a variety of nanomachines or applications.
    Nanotubes can conduct electricity. They are hollow and might
    potentially be used as containers to deliver very small amounts of dna.

    I attended a Nanoparticles in biology conference early this year in which
    a woman from the CSIRO (Australia) was talking about their early plans
    to use carbon nanotubes as wires between fixed gold points on circuit
    boards (gold can also be drawn very fine) and so make small circuits.
    The interesting thing was that they were considering holding the pieces
    together ie binding the nanotubes to the gold with DNA using
    dna and complementary dna molecules. They were going to have the
    circuits self assemble in solution.

    Sometime, when I get more time, I'll see if I can chase down the sources
    of the above, though they are quite likely not in the journals yet.

    Bottom line though is that nanotubes are *manufactured* and they
    have some particularly *useful* properties that (at least potentially)
    suggest that they will be amongst the first components used in
    anyset of components in nano assembly work.

    This answer is crude and all more knowledge extropes should please
    feel free to refine it.

    Regards,
    Brett



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